Ajax Girl

Sugar Publishing, the company behind the hugely successful Team Sugar and ten or so other blogs aimed at the female demographic, will announce a new round of financing tomorrow. They are not disclosing the size of the round, but it is being led by NBC Universal, with participation from previous investor Sequioia Capital. They previously raised $5 million, on a rumored $12-15 million pre-money valuation.

The deal also includes distribution through NBC’s massive ivilliage property (800 million monthly page views), and an exclusive advertising deal with NBC.

Sugar Publishing continues to grow at a torrent pace. They claim 4.5 million monthly unique visitors and 40 million page views (see earlier numbers here). CEO Brian Sugar says they will continue to launch new blogs over the summer, including CasaSugar (home), LilSugar (babies), CitizenSugar (politics), PetSugar (pets) and SavvySugar (career & finance).

This is a wonderful success story - we started tracking this company last August and they continue to do very, very well.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/128263335/

Google has announced an update to Google Docs and Spreadsheets that includes improved features and support for folders.

The entire document list within Google Docs and Spreadsheets has been given a complete visual overhaul with “new icons, more content, and better organizational controls”. Searching documents in the service has been improved; dynamically filtered results from documents are listed as a user types.

Folders are the biggest change. Google has not abandoned tagging and yet the inclusion of folders would indicate that Google is finally listening to the millions of people who prefer folders in preference to tagging.

The question I do have is what about Gmail? Without hopefully causing a flurry of people telling me how wonderful tagging is, I’m one of those (perhaps crazy) people who download my email from Gmail into a desktop based email client, and I do so only due to the lack of folders in Gmail. Hopefully the inclusion of folders in Google Docs is a sign of future functionality in Gmail.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/128262087/

Cellfish Media, a spin-off company from media company Lagardère (publisher of Elle and Premiere magazines) has launched Cellfish.com, a social network and destination portal centered on users sharing music, videos and art between their PCs and mobile devices.

Cellfish.com aims to tackle the issue of being able to share mobile entertainment while retaining the use of such content regardless of handset upgrades or changing service providers. Users are able upload content and display it on their personal Cellfish pages and their cell phones, then share that content with friends from a mobile device or PC. The Cellfish.com portal provides multiple content options including free for download and premium paid offerings on top of user generated content.

It’s an interesting offering, parts of MySpace+Youtube+Last.fm+Jamster combined and delivered on a cellphone. Function wise it appears easy to use and the variety of content is solid; it’s a crowded market but certainly this is still room for a strong mobile focused player.

New York based Cellfish Media has $60million in funding from Humagade Group, Solidarity Fund QFL; and the Telecom Media Fund, with Lagardère maintaining part ownership. Cellfish Media did $120million in revenue last year from its existing mobile service offerings; this is no revenue-free duck in the water startup but a serious player with money and experience in the mobile marketplace.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/128254331/

Ever since Microsoft launched Live Search last year, they’ve been keeping a steady pace of new services integrations as they grow the Live Suite, specifically integration between interfaces for mobile, desktop, and web, as well as between the users themselves via Live Spaces. The biggest piece to fall in place recently was the replacements for Hotmail and Outlook Express, the Windows Live Mail desktop and web client, which also featured Messenger integration.

Eventually Microsoft plans to release all the pieces of the Live Suite as a single upgradeable download instead of separate programs and services.

Tonight Microsoft has announced two more steps toward beefing up the Live Suite: Windows Live Photo Gallery Beta and Windows Live Folders Beta.

Windows Live Photo Gallery

Windows Live Photo Gallery beta is an improvement on the initial version of Photo Gallery they shipped with Windows Vista now made for XP as well. Photo Gallery is a free program that lets you easily download photos from your camera, organize, edit, and upload them to your Spaces account. Photos are organized by a familiar file tree structure by folder, date, tag, or album. Editing features include brightness/contrast, cropping, color control, and red eye reduction. You can even edit the photos into a video slide show using Microsoft Movie Maker (WMV MPG AVI).

Uploaded photos are linked to the ones on your desktop, allowing changes to tags, albums, and eventually photo captions to be synced with one another. An ActiveX control will enable users to securely grant access to their photos for third party sites to use. All the galleries will be available on your phone through the recently released Windows Mobile Live 6.

The cool new feature for this release however, is photo stitch, which sews together multiple photos into a panorama. The Microsoft team demoed the feature for me by snapping some photos of the San Francisco skyline as they walked around their hotel’s patio. Live Photo Gallery did an excellent job of nearly seamlessly stitching the photos into one continuous strand even though they were taken from different vantage points. Although photo stitch isn’t powered by recently acquired Photosynth, the team will be integrating the companies Seadragon technology into the program in the future.

Here’s some before and after of the photo stitching:

Windows Live Folders

Originally called “Live Drive” and widely anticipated, Live Folders is getting off the ground before the rumored GDrive. The service is being launched into a managed beta which will give a select group of testers 500MB of free online storage space. The new storage system will be located on an entirely new computing infrastructure Microsoft has been building to power Silverlight Streaming service and Hotmail system.

The beta system is pretty straight forward. Users can upload files via a webform or through an ActiveX control. Once on the system, files can be marked public, private, or be shared with other Live users by user name or through email by permalink. Files will be download only since Microsoft doesn’t have an office web suite yet. They will also be continually adding greater integration between Spaces and Folders so that files uploaded to one show up on the other.

The Folders beta is mainly meant to get user feedback to be used in future iterations. Microsoft already has plans to incorporate file syncing into the storage cloud powered by FolderShare, which they acquired back in 2005, stepping on the toes of quite a few startups along the way.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/128253803/

What value do founders have to any online business? According to Deadline Hollywood Daily, MySpace founders Chris DeWolfe and Tom Anderson are asking News Corp to hand over $50million over two years for both to stay at MySpace, a pay rate of $12.5million each per year. On top of that both are alleged to be asking for $15million to “invest in internet companies”.

To put that in perspective, IBM chairman and CEO Sam Palmisano took home US$17.9 million in compensation in 2006; Chip Goodyear, the CEO of BHP Billiton, the world’s largest mining company is made $6.5million in the same year. Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, CEO Eric Schmidt and Apple CEO Steve Jobs all have salaries of $1 per year, although all 4 benefit from dividends from stock held.

The report goes on to claim that News Corp has countered with a $15million offer, or $3.75 million each per year.

Are DeWolfe and Anderson worth the money? On the surface the request would seem absurd. This is not to belittle their contribution to the success of MySpace, but to ask for a pay rate that would make virtually everyone in Web 2.0 blush reeks of pure unadulterated greed. Both have already profited greatly from selling MySpace and are already wealthy as a result; if they no longer retain ownership so as to benefit on an ongoing basis directly for the site (like Jobs and the Google team) they have no one to blame other than themselves.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/128242666/

It seems to be Spring season for rich-interface technologies. Most trying to blossom with a story about how they’ll rescue developers from the perils of web programming and its dirty tech of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. These stories are told with a shadow assumption that the only reason developers put up with this trinity of web specs is because of what they get back in form of ubiquitous distribution.

That assumption then leads to the fallacy that if only someone could come along and give us a competitive distribution story using more “advanced” and “rich” interface technology, they’d surely be golden. That all web developers are waiting on is someone to save them from the browser mess and deliver them the clean desktop-development experience of yester-century.

In the immortal words of Eric Cartman: Bullcrap.

As a web developer, I’d like to confess my deep appreciation of the restricted canvas that we get from the basics of the web. We’ve entered an era where the browsers are good enough, compatible enough, and, most importantly, our understanding of how to use what we got has been raised to a level where things are finally looking pretty good.

I actually find the development experience between a modern web-application framework, Firebug, and current JavaScript libraries more than just bearable, I find it downright pleasant. Even more so because it’s born out of the pragmatism of not needing to be perfect. It has evolved over a decade of experimentation.

On the user experience side of things, we’re not even close to tapping out the potential of HTML. The majority of web sites and applications still suck. And if most developers and designers can’t make a clean run with the training wheels and constricted playground of HTML, then we probably are in no rush to start playing with a Ducatti on the Autobahn.

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/487-what-if-i-actually-like-html-css-and-javascript

David Pogue, the New York Times: The iPhone Matches Most of Its Hype.

Steven Levy, Newsweek: At Last, the iPhone.

Walt Mossberg, The Wall Street Journal: Testing Out the iPhone.

All reviews are positive on balance. The negatives mainly coaless around AT&T and EDGE as well as getting used to the keyboard. The keyboard gets better, EDGE does not.

The most surprising thing to me was how they all said the iPhone seems virtually scratch-proof. They’ve all tossed in their pockets, knocked it with change and keys, and keep it unprotected during the duration of their tests. And virtually no marks. That’s impressive. Some funky new materials or treatments perhaps?

Come on Friday!!!

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/488-iphone-reviews-the-first-batch

Seattle-based Jobster has had a rough time over the last several months. They radically changed their business model and went through a round of layoffs. The company, and CEO Jason Goldberg, has faced criticism for all of these changes.

Now a new storm is brewing over a former employee, Jason Davis. Davis previously sold a recruiting blog to Jobster, and worked with the company for a while. He eventualy left, but apparently had a non-compete in place.

Davis may have violated that non-compete when he started a new blog, RecruitingBlogs.com. Jobster and Davis have been “discussing” the issue behind the scenes, but it all became public today when Jobster sent Davis a cease & desist letter (see here and here as well).

I’ve pinged Goldberg for his side of the story. His response is below.

Hi Mike.

I will make my only public comment on this here to you, as follows:

We at Jobster are actually big fans of the www.recruitingblogs.com website. It’s a great site and offers recruiters an online blogging community that can be very valuable.

Our issue is not with recruitingblogs.com, rather it is with the site’s founder, Jason Davis. Jason Davis sold the www.recruiting.com online recruiting blogging community website to Jobster a little over a year ago. Jason Davis stayed on to run www.recruiting.com until a few months ago – when his one-year contract with Jobster ended. We parted amicably and wish only the best for Jason Davis. As part of his departure from Jobster/recruiting.com, Jason agreed to a fairly standard non-compete.

Jason has now launched www.recruitingblogs.com.

As would be expected, we’ve asked Jason Davis to honor his contractual agreement with Jobster. We’ve also offered/suggested that there is probably a good way for us to work together going forward. When we spoke to Jason Davis last week, we offered for him to come up some ideas on how we might work together. We would like to work this out in a way that benefits everyone.

Today, Jason Davis decided to go public instead.

Our overarching intent at Jobster and with our Recruiting.com website remains to foster online community in the recruiting industry — the more the better. At the same time, Jobster needs to ensure that our employees and contractors uphold their commitments.

I am certain that we can and will arrive at a good outcome for everyone on this.

Jason Goldberg

I’m not familiar with the law in Washington on non compete agreements, but in California its pretty clear - if you sell your company to someone for stock, they’re enforceable. We’ll see how this develops.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/128199949/

The embargoes have lifted iPhone reviews are starting to roll in. We were not so lucky as to be graced with one, but CrunchGear is keeping track of everything everyone is writing about the phone. The New York Times and Wall Street Journal are giving it a big thumbs up, ensuring that they will be continue to receive new Apple gadgets in the future. Or perhaps the iPhone really is a game changer that will finally bring the much anticipated mobile revolution to the U.S.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/128195691/

Real Networks has announced the public release of their new Real Player available on their website. We covered the beta release at the beginning of the month along with 20 beta accounts that went fast.

The new player focuses on bridging the gap for video between the desktop and the internet by letting users save and share video from any location on the net. The new player adds a “save this” button to any video playing in your browser. When you click it, Real will download the file in the background as you surf regardless of format. When you play the video back, you’ll have the option of sharing the video with friends, which emails out a link to the original. With the free version of the player you can burn the videos to CD, playable on most DVD players. Paying for the professional version lets you burn directly to DVD. A future version will let you push the videos to a media player instead.

The most notable use for the player will be on the video giant Youtube, which already attracted a series of third party download tools, including our very own. Real Player will recognize and respect DRM restrictions by not downloading restricted content.

The player is still for PC only, but they expect to have a Mac version out later this year.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/128181161/